1000 Days, 3281 Happy Memories
November 7th, 2007 at 21:42

If you’re a long time reader - and I mean long time - you might recall that in a bid to give myself an obsessive compulsive disorder, I’ve been tracking the amount of Coke (or more accurately, cola products and derivatives) I’ve been drinking. Not because I’m weird, you understand, but because I liked the idea of generating graphs to show something unnecessary - and the trouble is, once you start logging something, you don’t want to stop as you’ll be breaking the habit. Like chain smoking.

The reason this all began, some two and a half years ago now, was because I went to the dentist and he said I was fucking my teeth up (that’s an Orthodontic term) with the amount of Coke I’ve been consuming. I started the logs on the basis that I’d cut down and then take the graphs to him and say “look how excellent I’ve been”. If you look at the graphs, you’ll understand why I haven’t been back since.

I see it as a great scientific pursuit. After all, all of the great scientists have at one time or another experimented on themselves - I’m hoping that my tracking of my coke intake will allow me to better Marie Curie, who experimented on herself by giving herself radiation poisoning and promptly dying.

So yeah, I’ll just repeat what I’ve been doing, as I guess this revelation could come as something of a shock to the casual observer: I’ve been writing down every day how much Coke I’ve been drinking. And Monday was, somewhat incredibly, day one thousand.

But what does this mean?

What conclusions can I draw from the statistics I’ve generated? Er, not a lot really. In fact, I cannot think of a more pointless and unnecessary thing to log. But lets have a look at the numbers anyway.

In the last 1000 days, I have consumed 3281 Cokes. That averages 3.281 a day. If you break it down by brand of Coke consumed, which I’ve only been logging for a mere 674 days (since January 1st 2006 - it was a New Year’s Resolution) - 54% have been pure-bred Coca-Cola, 7% Diet Coke (a horrifying thought), 13% Coke Zero (yet I still haven’t turned into one of the wankers from the advert), 20% Pepsi (presumably due to my brand loyalty to Scream pubs) and 10% Pepsi Max. This gives Coke an over all James O’Malley-specific market share of 68% to Pepsi’s 31%. Which compared to eleven months ago is something of a fall for Pepsi.

Turning to the graphs now (click the tabs at the bottom on the link) to look at the trends, the Cokes per day average (cpd) is still consistently rising slightly from the all time low back from when I was still in sixth form - although it appears that I’m pushing my threshold for coping with Coke at 3cpd, as things seem to be levelling out slightly.

The sliding average, meanwhile, which is made up of three day averages shows the slow upwards trend to be continuing. What is interesting (I mean, in the loosest possible sense of the word - but you must be slightly captivated to have read this far in) is the massive spikes in Coke intake which have occurred every September on record. The analyst within me would put this down to it being “really warm at that time of year”.

Cumulatively, the trend is predictably upwards. I haven’t been sick in the last three years - in fact, I think the last time I was sick I was about twelve years old - so there’s not been any negative Coke to note. If I were a betting man, I’d say the cumulative Coke intake will probably increase constantly.

But… but… what does it all mean?

Nothing. It means nothing. Which I guess is a bit unfortunate. I reckon I’d make a damn good economist though if I could harness my power of graphs for good, instead of neutral.

Comments(0)

You Got Served
August 5th, 2007 at 22:31

As you might imagine, being in Paris, we spent a lot of time milling about in cafés, bars are restaurants. Whilst they all had a lot in common (they all tended to be expensive), the quality of the service we received varied.

We were in a restaurant near Saint Sulpice the day before we came home where on handing us the menus, the waiter visibly sighed and had an expression on his face that implied we’d just inconvenienced him. He bought some complementary bread sticks to the table and just chucked them down, again sighing loudly. When we got around to ordering though, he seemed to cheer up a bit though - presumably because he then knew how much money he was going to make off of us.

The barman in the Jazz club we went to on three of the nights was much better. His gimmick seemed to do be doing things with an unnecessary degree of haste. He made a great show of whipping the cap off of a bottle of Coke and throwing it into the bin, and he’d spin glass bottles of Orangina in the air to mix up the stuff.

I think the language barrier was a bit of a problem though. Its a bit dis-heartening to find that the French don’t understand your B-grade GCSE calibre grasp of French. Bizarrely, they don’t understand the words “un Coca-Cola s’il vous plait”, despite “Coca-Cola” being written on the bottle. So you have to call it “un coca”, as my French teacher always called it. What I wasn’t taught though was that “Coca” is pronounced “Cockka” (rhymes with Otter), and not “Cohw-kah“, like the actual product.

JD didn’t seem to have this problem. He’d always interject and say the exact same thing as what I’d said and the waiter would knowingly nod and understand what I wanted. By the end of the holiday JD was laughing and joking in French about his manly cocktail:

“Trés masculine, non?”

“[jibberish]”

“[laughter]“

Comments(0)

London II
April 5th, 2007 at 02:27

As you might know, having watched the video blog below, I went to London yesterday with JD and Fundar. We went there to see the third series of That Mitchell & Webb Sound being recorded. It’s basically like their similarly named telly sketch show, only if you close your eyes.

The day began at 11am, when we caught the train.

Coke Price Watch: 500ml bottle; At the station; Cost: £1.00.

About 90 minutes later and we were in central London.

Coke Price Watch: 500ml bottle; London St Pancras; Cost: £1.10.

Our first port of call was Camden market. It was a bit weird, as it was full of people in a different socio-economic group to me. Or at least people who dressed like it. Being a market, the place was covered in people hawking tat - even the shops were open at the front and sprawled out into the streets. It reminded me of seeing a news correspondent walk through a crowded Kabul market place, I mean, if Afghanistan was populated exclusively by goths.

One man even offered to sell us cannabis - not that I realised at the time.

Almost every other market stall was selling t-shirts with “hilarious” slogans. As you might know if you’re a regular viewer of my torso, I quite like t-shirts with slogans on. I’m currently wearing an excellent t-shirt with “I’m blogging this” printed on it, for example. The trouble is, it was like the t-shirts on sale were bought wholesale by people who are a few years behind everyone else. “National Pornographic” isn’t clever or funny and “I’m a bomb technician, if you see me running try to catch up” was old even when the first alchemists were inventing explosions for the first time.

Our next port of call was Leicester Square, where we went to get some lunch and have a look around.

Coke Price Watch: 500ml bottle; Leicester Square Subway; Cost: £1.20.

When I wasn’t buying overpriced Coke, we were trying to be too clever for our own good. We put together an excellently long shot for the video, and then JD phoned his brother to see if he could see us on a webcam. He could, although unfortunately screenshot evidence of this incredible event does not exist.

After lunch we headed to Embankment, which is just next to Whitehall, where all of the big Government buildings are. I love London because its so easy just to stumble into landmarks. It makes it almost unremarkable when you realise you’re standing outside of Royal Bank of Canada head office.

It took us a second to realise that we were standing outside the Ministry of Defence. Unfortunately, as you might see if you’ve watched the video, I didn’t remember to take the opportunity to mention the MOD’s seven paper cuts last year. We walked past it and bumped into the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. I’m the sort of person who finds this exciting.

Standing outside the FCO was Tim Marshall, Sky News’ Political editor. In retrospect, I probably should have gone and harassed him - after all, he is a celebrity, and I assume celebrities love nothing more than idiot members of the public going up to them and talking to them because they recognise them, despite not being able to remember their name.

Sort of next to the Foreign Office is Downing Street. The Downing Street. Despite it just being an old house that you can barely see behind the multiple layers of security (a ramp, a big set of gates, a number of police with machine guns) it was dead exciting. I reeled off as much Downing Street trivia as I could on the off chance that the Policeman near me would say “Hey, you know your stuff, want to go in for a look around?” Unfortunately he just continued to look stern.

Excellently, it was about at this point that I tried to show-off my knowledge of history by explaining that Whitehall used to be one massive Palace of Whitehall before it was destroyed by a fire. Fundar, being a cynic and troll, accused me of making this up just seconds before we passed a sign explaining that a building was the last remaining segment of the Palace of Whitehall.

Just behind the foreign office, when we weren’t really sure where we were going, we stumbled upon the Treasury. Not just any old treasury too mind- Her Majesty’s Treasury. I missed a golden opportunity to see if I could get in because I’m a tax-man - it would have made an excellent scene in the video too. I did, however, have this excellent photograph taken of me:

After a bit more walking we ended up near Parliament and Brian Haw’s anti-war protest. MPs passed a law to try and get rid of Brian, by banning protesting near Parliament without a license a couple of years ago - unfortunately for them, Brian’s still there because he’s been continuously protesting since before the ban came into force. Interestingly, Brian’s patch of green is surrounded entirely by a massive roundabout, and the conspiracy theorist within me thinks that they’ve made it intentionally difficult to get to the centre where Brian is by altering the traffic light patterns, as I was stuck in the centre for a good five minutes before I dared cross the road.

We spent a few minutes standing outside Westminster Abbey. We were going to go in for a couple of minutes, but discovered that it costs eight pounds to visit a church. Although you could apparently “worship for free”. I didn’t think I could get away with pretending to be religious.

We walked down past the Palace of Westminster to the green where they do the live reports on the telly and did a bit for the video, before deciding to head to the Tate Modern. Exciting travel story: we took the circle line from Westminster to Mansion House.

It turns out that St Paul’s Cathedral is right next to Mansion House, and opposite the Millennium Bridge.

Coke Pepsi Price Watch: 500ml bottle; Tate Modern; Price: £1.55 (yes, 55).

Unfortunately, it’s my sad duty to report that the Tate Modern is the most overrated place in history. Even more so than the Auschwitz “theme park” the Nazis set up during World War II.

I feel like an idiot for not being able to appreciate modern art, but most of it is shit. One of the biggest pieces (in terms of physical size) was Matisse’s Snail (click that for a picture). It’s some coloured paper laid out on to a bigger piece of paper. It looks like something a child with learning difficulties could have made.

What makes it worse is the, er, back-story, as it isn’t even deep and metaphorical. According to the textual description next to it, Matisse saw a snail, and then laid out some coloured paper in a shape (very, very, very, very) vaguely resembling a snail. That’s it? That’s shit.

Beret-wearing sycophants probably look at the same picture and say in their trumped-up posh accent and say to each other “that’s bloody brilliant, oh, it’s just so inspirational. My god, it’s a work of genius.”

Another incredible work was a canvas painted almost entirely orange, apart from a strip down the right hand side which was painted a slightly darker orange, the premise being that the darker line is “disruptive”, or something like that. I’ve never seen such pretentious bollocks, and I’m a regular viewer of Newsnight Review.

It must be great being an artsy twat, as you’d experience such an exciting life. “Fuck me! It’s a lightswitch… that’s just, like, so powerful… on and off, representing despair and consequence“.

One of the more ridiculous things was some metal tiles on the floor. Apparently this changes the viewers interaction with art by allowing you to walk on it. That’s fucking incredible. I mean, walking on tiles. Genius.

Judging by my experience with one of the members of staff, they seem to have employed the snootiest minimum wage workers available. I was carrying a sealed Pepsi, bought from their own cafe through one of the galleries, and a Zoe Wanamaker-esque woman approached me, and said without even mentioning the brand, “I see you have a carbonated drink, could you put it away please? We’ve had people drop them before causing spillages”. I can’t imagine the disasterous repercussions of Pepsi getting near birdshit on a canvas, or whatever. I’d have thought the artsy Tate people would enjoy interpreting what the Pepsi stain represents.

In fairness, it wasn’t all terrible. Roy Lichenstein’s Whaam! was good. And there was a gallery of some framed pages of an old Soviet magazine showing the industrialization of the USSR, which was interesting. And I can’t really complain about the entrance price, as it was free.

After we left the Tate bitterly disappointed, we thought it finally time to head to the Drill Hall to see Mitchell & Webb. We took the tube to Goodge Street.

Coke Price Watch: 500mlish glass; Goodge Street Hamburger Union; £1.65.

Before the show, we went to Hamburger Union, which seems to be a medium-speed food chain exclusive to London. We filmed some more video here.

Coke Price Watch: 330ml can; The Drill Hall; £1.

Finally, we got into Mitchell and Webb ready for the recording. Our tickets had been validated and we had been allocated seats. Unfortunately, before we could go in the theatre, we had to wait in a tiny bar for around an hour standing up with around 200 other people. It was almost unbearable after a day of running around London. My legs hurt and I was overheating, but we stuck with it, as, after all, we were now at the primary reason why we were in London.

Mitchell and Webb recorded two shows at once, so we got approximately 90 minutes of new sketches from them, supported by Olivia Coleman and James Bachman And they were excellent. There were a few about a doctor arguing with a patient who got diagnosis’s off of the internet, which got progressively more surreal. If this sketch makes the translation to their second TV series, I imagine “I’m Bill Paxton” will become a well known catchphrase. You’ll know why when you see it.

Other memorable sketches were “Celebrity Fame Zepplin”, in which Mitchell reeled off hundreds and hundreds of reality TV clichés in quick succession and parodies if Radio 4’s Afternoon Play.

In retrospect, I should have taken my iTalk and covertly recorded it so I could write more about this. I can’t remember many more of the things they did, but I remember enjoying it immensely. So, er, I guess I win.

I had an incredibly good day over all, and I don’t think even if I had bumped into Hitler on the train home he could have dampened my spirit that much. London late at night is surprisingly non-threatening, but we were in a reasonably posh area- right near Tavistock Square, of London Bombings fame, in fact. I imagine I’d be telling a different story if they’d been recording the radio show in Hackney or wherever. And you’d be reading this from my will rather than my blog.

It was also a research packed day - our serious scientific survey has conclusively proved that London prices are infinitely more expensive than rural England. Which, er, is no surprise really.

I would highly recommend listening to That Mitchell & Webb Sound when it’s broadcast on the radio - I’ll plug it on here when it is, as it’s dead good.

Well done for making it through nearly 2000 words too. Why not watch the video?

Comments(2)

Cokewatch - Another year gone
January 1st, 2007 at 21:56

As long time blog readers might know, for the past 691 days I’ve been logging the amount of Coke that I drink. Why? The dentist told me that I drink too much, so I started keeping a note of the number of “servings” of Coke I have every day. By ‘Coke’, I mean all cola drinks… Coke’s just become a genericized trademark.

What is a serving? I count a serving as “one glass” or “one can” or whatever, as I’d look ridiculous carrying around a measuring cylinder to do this any more accurately.

See the full log: here.

One New Years Day last year I took this a step further and started logging the different brands of Cola that I’ve been drinking. Why? So I can make this incredible diagram:

So the Coca-Cola company are winning by a massive margin… I wonder how many Columbian trade unionists I’ve inadvertently killed by drinking so much of their produce? I’m thinking of buying shares in BAE and financing some civil wars and dictatorships, so that drinking Coca-Cola will be slightly more ethical by my standards.

So anyway, in the last year I’ve had 1275 cokes. If we assume each Coke to be 330ml- a conservative estimate, as I often go for 550ml bottles or, er, pints: that’s about 420.75 litres.

Looking at the totals since I first started logging Coke, back on 9th February 2005, I’ve drank 2140 Cokes. That’s an average of 3.09 a day. Things get really interesting (!) when you look at this stuff graphically. Look at the Cokes per Day average (CPD) over time. Try as I might to give up Coke, it seems that I’m stuck at about 3cpd, as things are sort of levelling off again after a massive increase since leaving school.

The sliding average is perhaps more useful- its the average number of cokes over the last three days, and the graph shows how that average changes over time. Its showing a gradual increase to 3 a day.

I’m sure there’s some sort of conclusions I can draw from this. There must be some purpose, and some reason why I’m keeping track of this sort of thing. Any ideas, anyone?

Comments(0)

Cameron and Coke Zero
October 14th, 2006 at 15:41

It occured to me last night that David Cameron and the new Coke Zero are really similar. I know this sounds a bit odd, but bear with me.

Both are a weak immitation of an older and better product- in this case, Coca Cola and New Labour. Both are designed to appeal to new demographics- in Coke’s case, judging by the adverts, its going after the youg male segment of the market- whilst David Cameron is going after normal people.

After an initial period of popularity, both are now experiencing flatlining in growth.

Both campaigns are fronted by a smug twat: Cameron himself, and the generic Nuts-reading slackjawed moron from the adverts.

Both Coke Zero and David Cameron seem to have a habit of making statements devoid of any sort of meaning or point.

• “Wouldn’t it be great if you could have holidays without coming home?” (Coke Zero advert)
• “And Girlfriends without commitment?” (Coke Zero advert)
• “If we want new homes, they must be built somewhere” (Cameron’s Conference Speech 2006)
• “People who threaten our security should be arrested, charged, put in front of a court, tried and imprisoned.” (Cameron)
• “All families do a vital job, and they all need our support.” (Cameron)
• “Improving our environment and quality of life.” (Cameron)

And is it a coincidence that the name of one product alludes to an activity that the other allegedly did at University? (Coke Zero did some lines of Cameron).

Comments(0)

Mexican Coke
August 7th, 2006 at 23:23

My mate Heggs is back from his gap year in Belize, Guatemala and Mexico. He’s spent the last six months trekking around a tropical paradise… almost as exciting as what I’ve been doing. Last night he had a big party to celebrate his return.

Excellently, he bought me some Mexican Coke back- apparently it tastes slightly different to its American (and presumably British) equivilent. It tasted lovely- and was a 600ml bottle, compared to the 550ml crap you get here. It was lovely- and probably had a greater chance of killing Columbian trade unionists than British bought coke (because its nearer, it obviously has a greater effect).

He probably had some excellent stories about his adventure too which would make an excellent blog entry, but the Coke! It was wonderful- and Heggs presented it to me wearing a mini-sombrero. Coke! Coke!

It was a good evening overall- all of the usual people were there, as well as Heggs’ mate from Belize, who went out there with him. At one point in the evening, for some reason that I forget, I told the group that I thought I was “pretty cool” - bizarrely, despite having known me for approximately two hours by this point, Heggs’ friend laughed hardest, with the most contempt at this. I couldn’t Belize my eyes.

Comments(1)

Featured in The Demon
May 22nd, 2006 at 15:14

A few months ago I wrote an exposé of MPs Coke habits. Well, “exposé” is perhaps too strong and foreign a word- I e-mailed all of the members of Parliament and asked them if they like CocaCola or Pepsi for a cheap gag.

Excitingly, this attracted some attention, being featured in the popular B3ta newsletter, as well real proper newspaper ‘Wales on Sunday‘- and now my media whoring has got it featured in another publication: my University’s newspaper.

Amazingly, it’s been featured in the right hand column on page three- the first thing you’d see when you open the paper. I’ve run some tests by opening the paper 500 times and seeing where my eyes go, in order to validate this assertion. Incredibly, it also gets a frontpage plug directly underneath the main banner. The only thing that really upstages me an interview with Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary.

I’m somewhat proud that I’ve probably managed to knock an insightful piece about the election of Hamas the implications for the Palestinians back a couple of pages- just so I can talk rubbish. Unlike Wales on Sunday, my words have been pasted in, my name on the byline, prefixed by the word “Columnist”. Excellent.

Comments(1)

Featured in Wales on Sunday!
February 28th, 2006 at 18:10

I’ve been featured in a national newspaper! Well, Welsh national newspaper at least! Wales on Sunday’s Matt Withers column had a bit on the MP Coke survey I did a while back.

The full of text of the article is thus:

DAVID Cameron steadfastly refused throughout his successful bid for the Tory leadership to be drawn on whether he’d ever taken coke. This reticence, however, appears to have spread throughout the House of Commons, with MPs unwilling to say whether they like Coke. Or prefer its rival, Pepsi. A blogger called James O’Malley decided earlier this month, for no apparent reason, to e-mail every single MP with the urgent request ‘Do you prefer Coca-Cola or Pepsi?’. A grand total of 45 MPs found the time to respond, with around 80 per cent opting for Coke. Sadly, only one Welsh MP was willing to state his preference – Rhondda member Chris Bryant is a Pepsi man.

No actual URL credited, but its better than nothing!

Is anyone Welsh reading? Does anyone have a copy of this newspaper in question (Presumably last Sunday)? Get in touch!

And for the sake of some extra backstory, the e-mail alerting me to my appearance was this:

Just thought I’d let you know we used your Coca-Cola survey in our paper (Wales on Sunday) this weekend - I’ve e-mailed you the pdf - your survey is bottom of page 8 on my widely-read column. Thought you might enjoy the glory, because you’re not getting any cash or owt…

I am indeed enjoying the glory! Thanks Matt!

Comments(4)

One year, (nearly) One thousand Cokes
February 9th, 2006 at 14:18

Today marks an important day in human history. The day that James O’Malley proved that his logging his coke intake has changed absolutely nothing atall.

What?! New readers, you must be confused. For the past year I’ve been keeping track of the number of Cokes I’ve been drinking a day- the term “coke” in this case applies to all cola drinks from the awful Freeway Cola to the lovely Pepsi in a pub. I’ve logged it by the number of “servings”- one serving being anything from a small glass to a 750ml bottle.

Why am I doing this? Last time I went to the dentist, he told me to cut down on my coke intake- to help me do this, I decided to log what I drink, so next time I go to the dentist I have some raw data and some pretty graphs to show him.

But you knew all of that anyway, right? Lets have a look at the results.

Just looking exclusively at the start and “end” data, you can see that my CPD average went from 3, down only slightly to 2.7. Oo-er. Just 0.3 Cokes after going as low as 2.11 in May! If you look at the “CPD” over time graph, you’ll see that it lowered dramatically before shooting right back up again.

If you look at the “Cokes in a day over time”- a log of the absolute number of Cokes I have had in a day, you’ll see that there is a huge jump in September… incidentally the month I started University. Clearly the notion that students drink lots doesn’t just apply to alcohol.

The cumulative graph isn’t very exciting. It’s just a big curve.

I think the sliding average graph is one of the most interesting- it shows a definate upwards trend and worryingly, each value is entirely dependent on the three days around it- meaning that I am actually drinking more than before.

So all in all, not a great year. In this coming year though, I’m going to try and beat it- by which I mean, drink a lower number of cokes than before. I’ve stepped up my obsessive-compulsive behaviour too, and I’m now trying to log the individual brands that I drink, too.

Stay tuned for more thrilling Coke action folks!

Comments(2)

Members of Parliament in Coke habit shocker
February 1st, 2006 at 16:25

A while back now I e-mailed every single member of Parliament and asked them if they prefer CocaCola, or its age old rival, Pepsi. Cleverly, I’d written a script that sent e-mails that look personal but wern’t- it just put their name in the relevant places.

I’ve now got 44 responses, and I think that’s enough for me to draw some exciting conclusions.

It appears MPs love doing Coke as much as I do- statistically, and this is absolutely true: Eight out of ten Members of Parliament prefer CocaCola to the closest leading competitor.

What I find most odd is that loads of MPs specifically identified Diet Coke as their preferred choice… does it taste different in the palace of Westminster or something? It’s vile. Quite why Boris, among others like it is beyond me.

Among other celebrity responses: former foreign-secretary Malcolm Rifkind is a full-strength Coke man. We should have perhaps predicted that former Lib Dem home-affairs (!) spokesman Mark Oaten was gay… he drinks DIET Coke. I wonder what he was doing on his “Diet Coke break” etc etc.

Interestingly, Edward Davey, the man who sort of led the rebellion against Charles Kennedy, drinks Pepsi, whilst the rest of his party are apparently staunch Coke people. Was this what caused the rift? Was it a drink problem?

No one really interesting from the Labour party responded- presumably they were too busy governing to answer an inconsequential (if revealing) survey.

I’ve posted the full set of results as a page, so you can see what your MP drinks!

Comments(18)